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Wednesday, January 9, 2008

Intersections

I was going to write about whoring this morning, for a story about teenagers in the desert, and came across this. Read it, it might break your heart, but probably only in the context of everything else CCG has written before and after that: matter-of-fact entries about ... well, life as a call girl.

I never really talk about being a woman before being a writer but it occurred to me that this reality (and my own misconceptions and discoveries and ruminations) is really an intrinsic part of how I am as a person. The zodiac signs may hint at a hidden femininity, but it is the self-effacing, the omniscience-feigning-to-sound-even-remotely-credible, mixed in with a bluff-till-you-drop, smug-to-a-fault, laugh-at-life-in-the-face kind of humor/being/writing drama that betrays the hidden girl in me.

Because this has been my brand of woman for the longest time: hiding in the spotlight of male dominance, secretly jealous of their nonchalance, their self-confidence, their effortless banters, secretly ashamed of looking like a girl if and when I look like a girl, secretly disgusted at things that remind me I am weak, when I really am. There's no use explaining these things but that is the truth for some--we hate different things for different reasons, but whether we're wrong or right about it doesn't matter, it is the hatethat is the problem.

And so it is only recently that I realized that regardless of who you (or whether you do) love or how you arrange your life in congruence with who you think you are to the world, who you really are lies in the wake of how much (or how little) you are willing to explore your sexuality. There is no other way around it.